Just thought how handy it would be to have a cloud based storage system which treats your device's local storage as an automatically-maintained cache. A bit like Dropbox only instead of choosing desktop (clones cached locally) vs. mobile (no local storage), the filesystem automatically decides for you, flushing old copies you haven't touched in a while and downloading stuff you are revisiting.

All you see is that you just format and mount your storage device or partition using the magic FS and its capacity magically extends into the cloud, just cacheing locally what you are most likely to want in a hurry or when offline.

Whatever client device you have going, you format and mount its local storage as the "same" pile of stuff and it then manages that local cache according to local needs.

At a pinch it could even pass your swap file out to the cloud, giving you a rude message about running 500 apps on a Sinclair calculator but at least not losing anything.

Does such a thing already exist?

"Klinger, do you know how many zoots were killed to make that one suit?" — BJ Hunnicutt, 4077 M*A*S*H

The ownCloud mobile app suffers the same limitation of the Dropbox one, it only syncs files when you ask it to. An option to sync automatically when on Wi-Fi, or only sync files newer than a certain age, would be a welcome addition to either app.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." (Albert Einstein)

The idea is to dig deeper into the OS layer and to insulate the user from needing to manage anything. Dropbox and OwnCloud are essentially data clouds bolted on to an existing client installation. ChromeOS goes a step further and stores your apps in the cloud as well, with the option to do stuff locally only on some devices. Some kinds of smart terminal load even their OS over the network (usually an intranet or VPN) when you switch them on.

Install your OS onto a magic FS partition and from that moment you need neither know nor care which stuff is cached locally and which held only in the cloud.

"Klinger, do you know how many zoots were killed to make that one suit?" — BJ Hunnicutt, 4077 M*A*S*H

There is a facility called, 'Squirrel.com' that you can use to put your data on the cloud. You can put an unlimited amount of data on there - no cap or limit is applied throughout you subscription which is £61.00 per year - which I think is very reasonable considering that you don't have a limit on how much data you are allowed to store as a backup or otherwise - it has certainly freed up some of my storage devices! linuxfanatik